Inter-Agency Response to Domestic Violence in a Medium Sized City

Inter-agency work is a key feature of many crime prevention and community safety efforts and part of the foundation of modern policing. No longer is crime control viewed as solely the purview of the police, but rather as an outcome for which many agencies share responsibility. As acceptance of this idea has increased, inter-agency collaborative efforts have multiplied. Nowhere have these coordinated community crime control efforts been more fully recognized and advanced than in efforts to address domestic violence.

The present study examines one city’s efforts to reduce domestic violence through the coordinated work of the city police department and a wide range of criminal justice, social services, and community agencies. The city (here, and throughout this report, anonymous) is in the mid-Atlantic region of the country, has approximately 200,000 residents, and a police department with approximately 700 police officers. This research entailed study of an interagency domestic violence coalition, the Domestic Violence Coordinating Committee (DVCC), as well as two separate exploratory analyses of the city police department’s domestic violence data.

After presenting the methodology and literature review, the findings of this study are presented in two parts. The first part pertains to the history and current state of the DVCC and includes Chapters 4 and 5. Chapter 4 is a description of the inception of DVCC and its evolution up until the year 2000 when the field research for this project began. Chapter 5 is a description of the DVCC at the time of the field research, a description of the domestic violence service community of which the DVCC is a part, a discussion of the perspectives about the police department expressed by members of the domestic violence service community, and a list of recommendations for improving police response to domestic violence developed by the Police Foundation.

The second part is comprised of Chapters 6 and 7. Chapter 6 is an analysis of the practice known as dual arrest, where police officers arrest both parties in an intimate assault. This exploratory analysis includes comparisons among cases resulting in issuance of a warrant, single arrest, and dual arrest as well as logistic regression analysis testing the relationship between case characteristics and dual arrest. Chapter 7 explores the utility of spatially analyzing reported intimate assault data by using several different methods to map these crimes and compare geographic patterns to neighborhood demographic characteristics.

Because this report covers a wide range of topics within the broad area of domestic violence, it is written so that each chapter ties in with the others, but contains a distinct qualitative or quantitative analysis that can be read separately. For this reason, each chapter includes its own conclusions, references, and in some cases summaries of relevant literature. Therefore, except for a general summary of literature on inter-agency domestic violence work, there are no overall summaries of literature, references, or conclusions.

The concern of this project is violence committed against one member of a current or past intimate couple by the other, which we refer to as intimate violence. “Domestic violence” is a broader term used to describe intimate violence as well as violence between non-intimate familial or household members. In the chapters summarizing literature and describing the DVCC, we use the term “domestic violence,” because this is a term conventionally used by interagency approaches; but regardless of the term used, throughout this report, our subject is intimate violence.

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http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/files/ric/Publications/Inter-Agency_Response_DV.pdf